The debut novel by the bestselling author of THE ESSEX SERPENTOne hot summer`s day, John Cole decides to leave his life behind. He shuts up the bookshop no one ever comes to & drives out of London. When his car breaks down & he becomes lost on an isolated road, he goes looking for help, & stumbles into the grounds of a grand but dilapidated house. Its residents welcome him with open arms
- but there`s more to this strange community than meets the eye. They all know him by name, they`ve prepared a room for him, & claim to have been waiting for him all along. Who are these people? & what do they intend for John? Elegant, gently sinister & psychologically complex, After Me Comes the Flood is the haunting debut novel by the author of The Essex Serpent.
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Tamerlane, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Manchus, the British, the Soviets, the Japanese & the Nazis. All built empires they hoped would last forever: all were destined to fail. But, as John Darwin shows in his magnificent book, their empire building created the world we know today. From the death of Tamerlane in 1405, last of the ‘world conquerors’, to the rise & fall of European empires, & from America’s growing colonial presence to the resurgence of India & China as global economic powers, ” After Tamerlane” provides a wonderfully intriguing perspective on the past, present & future of empires. ...

After Taste: Expanded Practices in Interior Design is an edited volume comprising texts, interviews & portfolios that collectively document new theories & emerging critical practices in the field of interior design. The material is informed by, but not limited to, the annual After Taste symposia hosted by Parsons The New School of Design. The book`s central argument is that the field of interior design is inadequately served by its historical reliance on taste-making & taste-makers, &, more recently from a set of theoretical concerns derived from architecture; the volume seeks to set an expanded frame by advancing new voices & perspectives in both the theory & practice of interior design, considered as an independent discipline. In 2007, the Department of Architecture, Interior Design & Lighting at Parsons The New School for Design inaugurated an annual international symposium series dedicated to the critical study of the interior. Titled After Taste, these yearly symposia offer expansive views of interior studies, highlight emerging areas of research, identify allied practices, make public its under-explored territory, & attract future designers & scholars to the field. Now in its fourth year, After Taste has proven to be one of the very few venues internationally for critically exploring interior design. The field of interior design is asymmetrically served by the current literature in the field. Too frequently, the current writing & making in interiors emphasize the ineffable, the biographical, & the social elite, & promote a curiously unsubstantiated notion of connoisseurship as the principal basis for design. Other attempts to construct an intellectual agenda for the study of the interior draw heavily from architectural theory, ignoring the discipline`s own specific & autonomous history. After Taste, the book, is intended to adjust this imbalance by introducing interior design material that is theoretically & historically situated, technically grounded, demographically inclusive, & aesthetically adventurous. ...

For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm & shrewdness. But when the she falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renounces her business in order to become his wife. But it is not so easy to renounce her independent spirit, & eventually Kazu must choose between her marriage & the demands of her irrepressible vitality. After the Banquet is a magnificent portrait of political & domestic warfare. ...

Edwidge Danticat had long been scared off from Carnival by a loved one, who spun tales of people dislocating hips from gyrating with too much abandon, losing their voices from singing too loudly, going deaf from the clamor of immense speakers, & being punched, stabbed, pummeled, or fondled by other lustful revelers. Now an adult, she resolves to return & exorcise her Carnival demons. During her journeys she traces the heroic & tragic history of the isl&, from French colonists & Haitian revolutionaries to American invaders & home-grown dictators. Danticat also introduces us to many of the performers, artists, & organizers who re-create the myths & legends that bring the Carnival festivities to life. When Carnival arrives, we watch as she goes from observer to participant & finally loses herself in the overwhelming embrace of the crowd. Part travelogue, part memoir, this is a lyrical narrative of a writer rediscovering her country along with a part of herself. ...

“ After the Fire, a Still Small Voice” is the debut novel from Evie Wyld, winner of the * John Llewellyn Prize* & was shortlisted for the * Orange Award for New Writers*. The novel centres on Frank & Leon, two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents` mistakes is how to make different ones of your own. Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family`s beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbors & their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, & when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank. Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family`s cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War. When war breaks out again, Leon must go from sculpting sugar figurines to killing young men as a conscript in the Vietnam War. ...

` London was but is no more!` In these words diarist John Evelyn summed up the destruction wrought by the Great Fire that swept through the City of London in 1666. The losses included St Paul`s Cathedral & eight-seven parish churches (as well as at least thirteen thousand houses). In After the Fire, celebrated photographer & architectural historian Angelo Hornak explores, with the help of his own stunning photographs, the churches built in London during the sixty years that followed the Great Fire, as London rose from the ashes, more beautiful
- & far more spectacular
- than ever before. The catastrophe offered a unique opportunity to Christopher Wren & his colleagues
- including Robert Hooke & Nicholas Hawksmoor
- who, over the next forty years, rebuilt St Paul`s & fifty-one other London churches in a dramatic new style inspired by the European Baroque. Forty-five years after the Fire, the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711 gave Nicholas Hawksmoor the scope to build breathtaking (and controversial) new churches including St Anne`s Limehouse, Christ Church Spitalfields & St George`s Bloomsbury. By the 1720s the pendulum was swinging away from the Baroque of Wren & Hawksmoor, & it was James Gibbs` more restrained St Martin-in the-Fields that was to provide the prototype for churches throughout the English-speaking world
- especially in North America
- for the next hundred years.





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We all now know that the arctic is the canary in the coal mine of climate change, but that is only part of the story. As Alun Anderson reveals in this fascinating book, the melting snow & ice are now giving way to a much bigger story of battles over vast deposits of gas, oil & minerals, arguments over control of new sea lanes & disputes over access to huge new, untapped fisheries in rich, warming seas. The arctic has become a new frontier, where the future wealth & power of northern nations
- including Britain
- is being fought out today. From the titanium Russian flag that now sits on the sea bed beneath the North Pole to disagreements over where Greenland starts & ends, this is a topic that is only going to become more important. This compelling book reveals the full story of what is happening today in this most important of regions & what needs to be done to preserve it for all humanity
- but also shows how the arctic will have its own revenge if we`re unable to find a solution now.


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The economy was booming. People had more money than they knew what to do with. & then the earthquake struck. For the characters in After the Quake, the Kobe earthquake is an echo from a past they buried long ago. Satsuki has spent thirty years hating one man: a lover who destroyed her chances of having children. Did her desire for revenge cause the earthquake? Junpei`s estranged parents live in Kobe. Should he contact them? Miyake left his family in Kobe to make midnight bonfires on a beach hundreds of miles away. Fourteen-year-old Sala has nightmares that the Earthquake Man is trying to stuff her inside a little box. Katagiri returns home to find a giant frog in his apartment on a mission to save Tokyo from a massive burrowing worm. ` When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes, ` says Frog. ` And right now he is very, very angry.` This new collection of stories, from one of the world`s greatest living writers, dissects the violence beneath the surface of modern Japan. ...

In August 1947 the British ended the ` Raj` & left India. Some stayed on; others who had grown up in India shortly returned there. Over the next sixty years they adapted to modern India while always being conscious of their legacy, the inheritance of the Raj. This is the story of the very last of the stayers-on. Through their eyes we see how the legacy has withered over the years but, with their help, also how it has evolved in a new millennium: from post-imperial hangover to heritage industry; from the singing of Victorian hymns in neo-Gothic churches to a new Christian evangelism; from Shakespeare wallahs to multimedia English language teaching & call centres. Tea planter, missionary, tiger hunter turned conservationist, club manager, `box-wallah`, antiques dealer, single mother in the ghost town of Mc Cluskiegunge
- they all have remarkable stories to tell. & now there are fewer than a dozen of the stayers-on left. Hugh Purcell`s After the Raj is the haunting, uplifting, unexpected story of the very last remnants of British India.
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